Sermon: The glory of the Ascension (preached at St Chad's College, in the University of Durham)

Music has always been an important part of my journey, and it is through music as well as word and sacrament that I invite you to encounter the mystery of the divine presence among us.  The fact that many of the words of the anthems come from the 17th century is no coincidence.  George Herbert, John Donne and others have been my challenging and mystical companions whose insights still resonate with 20th and 21st century pilgrims.  The setting of their words by more modern composers adds an extra dimension to their homely and disturbing metaphors...

The words of Bishop Ian Cundy, from the Introduction which he wrote to be printed in the order of service for his own Requiem Eucharist, read by all those who gathered in the Cathedral Church of Peterborough on Tuesday afternoon.  They are wise words, and I quote them because they strike me as being every bit as appropriate to the Feast of the Ascension as they were to a bishop's funeral mass.  And, serendipitously, they describe the Introit with which we began, whose words were written by Edward Taylor (born in 1646 and died in 1729), and which were set to music by Gerald Finzi in 1951:

God is gone up with a triumphant shout: the Lord with sounding trumpets' melodies; sing praise, sing praises out, unto our King sing praise seraphic-wise!  Lift up your heads, ye everlasting doors (they sing) and let the King of Glory enter in.

Methinks I see heaven's sparkling courtiers fly, in flakes of glory down him to attend, and hear heart-cramping notes of melody surround his chariot as it did ascend; mixing their music, making every string more to enravish as they this tune sing: God is gone up with a triumphant shout: the Lord with sounding trumpets' melodies; sing praise, sing praises out, unto our King sing praise seraphic-wise!  Lift up your heasd, ye lasting doors (they sing) and let the King of Glory enter in.

No feast challenges the way we see the dimensions and directions of the work of God in the world quite like this one.  We survey a landscape of the rather unfortunate wreckage of the botched attempts to render it comprehensible to the laws of nature.  Witness the innumerable depictions of feet poking out of clouds.  Imagine my mild satisfaction at finding cobwebs on those in a chapel in one of my favourite shrines, nature quietly suggesting the redundancy of a faulty image!

Too bald a reading risks making the Ascension look like a circus act, of the kind that the Ball brothers used to enact at either end of Gloucester Cathedral, just as too bald a reading of the Resurrection verges on sounding like a conjuring trick with bones (to borrow from the great David Jenkins).  The problem with both is that they fall too far short of what God is doing, and fail to engage with what it is God might be trying to convey through words which simply cannot summon enough subtlety.

Enter the seventeenth century poets.  In God is gone up Taylor carefully introduces ‘methinks' before he describes the vision.  Here is contemplation.  The vision might be said to be more of what one hears than what one sees, for here it is the sound that entrances the prophet's ear.  It does so through the well-loved call of trumpets (‘homely', in Bishop Ian's description), but does not rest there.  These sounds are ‘heart-cramping', mixed in such a way as to ‘enravish' the heart-strings: what we might, in the strictest sense, call ‘disturbing'.  But it is in the spaces that those carefully-posed metaphors create that glory makes its presence felt.  Add the contrasts of Finzi's music and the effect is sublime.

One could carry on with William Harris's setting of John Donne's prayer ‘Bring us, O Lord God, at our last awakening', or Ralph Vaughan Williams's settings of several of George Herbert's poems, but my point would be the same: that we find ourselves brought to the contemplation of glory through the sacramentality of words and music.

It is inevitable that I should speak in this way, having had a theological formation in which Ann Loades and David Brown played major parts.  We are well accustomed (or we ought to be by now) to a theology which traces the origin of the sacraments from the person of Jesus, himself the first and foremost outward and visible sign of inward and spiritual grace; to get away from seeing the sacraments as two (or three or seven) immutable rituals, but understanding that sacramentality flows from Christ through the whole created order.

The sacramentality of Incarnation speaks of the divine life coming in to outward and visible signs.  But I want to suggest that the sacramentality of the Ascension speaks of the outward and visible signs being drawn into the divine life, and thereby adds a sense of fullness, of coming full circle.  The beginning and the ending of Christ's time on earth gives us a sacramental frame, as his birth draws God's life into ours, and his ascending draws our life into God's.

But we have arrived at a point where the modern church isn't really cutting the mustard.  What we are talking about is the mystery of glory.  But who ever talks about it? People often criticise Thomas Cranmer for being bogged down in sin in the pages of the Book of Common Prayer, but they will be hard-pressed to find contemporary liturgy with as keen a sense of glory.  For Cranmer the two went hand in hand: be realistic about our failings was necessary to be realistic about the means of grace and the hope of glory.

Perhaps this is why the Ascension has become yet another doctrinal embarrassment.  For all we pretend not to be, you can tell the church of today is more obsessed with sin because we never stop talking about it (especially sexual sin about which Jesus had practically nought to say), and we spend most of our time trying to mitigate it.  We don't really know what to say about glory because we're all so busy trying to be social-workers who sing hymns that we dismiss glory as escapism, and panic about having to say something about the Ascension that doesn't sound like we're suggesting that Jesus was taken up by a giant hoover in the sky.

It's sad that we have lost the knack of talking about glory when the Incarnation and the Ascension are showing us that the world is bursting with it.  We wallow in self-pitying sin, as the news broadcasts trot out the latest round of horrors, fall under their spell of cynicism, even, God help us, end up reading the Dail Mail, and spend so much time trying to do God's job for him that we forget to look around and see what he's doing himself and joining in.  Typical of our age we pour out our efforts as a pound of cure, instead of the ounce of prevention more characteristic of the Gospel.

In other words, we're looking in the wrong place.  Like the men of Galilee, we stand gawping into heaven.  We're not going to see glory staring up there, because it's in our midst, in that deepest reality which is the handiwork of God, the people made in his own image and likeness, the flesh he himself became, which he filled with his divine presence in his Incarnation and now draws into his divine life in his Ascension.

Michael Ramsey was a great one for talking about glory.  He used, apparently, to shout the word often and quite randomly.  Before very long the Cathedral will be graced with a window currently being made by Tom Denny, depicting another moment of New Testament glory: the Transfiguration.  I hope and pray that it will remind people of the truth of the words of St Irenaeus which Ramsey wanted on his tombstone at Canterbury:

The Glory of God is the living man;

The life of man is the Vision of God.